Findings From New Survey Offer a Look at Web Archiving Projects in the U.S.

The NDSA Content Working Group, one of the five working groups of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance focuses on identifying content already preserved, investigating guidelines for the selection of significant content, discovery of at-risk digital content or collections, and matching orphan content with NDSA partners who will acquire the content, preserve it, and provide access to it. As part of this effort, the group conducted a survey of organizations in the United States that are actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the web. Conducted from October 3 through October 31, 2011, the goal of the survey was to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the United States by identifying the organizations involved, the types of web content being preserved, the tools and policies being used, and the types of access being provided.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.